50 



NATURE 



\_May 15, 1879 



teachers themselves. . . . The admirable influence which 

 the Scottish universities have hitherto exerted upon the 

 people of the country has been due not only to the 

 prolonged and systematic course of mental discipline to 

 which their students have been subjected, but to the 

 stimulus and encouragement given to inquiring minds by 

 distinguished men who have made the professorial chairs 

 centres of intellectual life; and we cannot think it desirable 

 that any such changes should be made as would tend to 

 lower the universities into mere preparatory schools for 

 some central examining board." 



We are gratified to think that the sentiments which we 

 expressed in these columns nearly three years ago should 

 have received the sanction of such high authorities. As 

 the subject is one of great importance, our readers will 

 perhaps allow us to repeat the objections we then raised 

 to the establishment of a Central Examining Board (see 

 Nature, vol. xiv. p. 255) : — 



" The Calendar of the Central Board must inevitably 

 embody only the best-known and most widely-diffused 

 results of knowledge — not that which is growing and 

 plastic, but that which has already grown and hardened 

 into shape — the knowledge, in fact, of a past generation 

 which has become sufficiently weU established to be 

 worthy of this species of canonisation. A very powerful 

 inducement is thus offered to the professors of the various 

 colleges to teach their pupils according to this syllabus, 

 and a very powerful discouragement to attempt to alter 

 it. They may be men of great originality and well quali- 

 fied to extend and amend their respective spheres of 



knowledge, but they have no inducement to do so 



It is the old and time-honoured custom of killing off the 

 righteous man of the present age in order the more effec- 

 tually to garnish the sepulchres of his predecessors. 

 Our readers are well aware that the natural philosophy 

 course has changed its character very greatly of late years, 

 and that for this we are much indebted to Professors Sir 

 W. Thomson and P. Guthrie Tait. But could these men 

 have done this under the system of a Central Board ? If 

 they had succeeded it must have been, as Galileo suc- 

 ceeded, against the attempt made by the ruling authori- 

 ties of his day to stop his voice and strangle his origin- 

 ality." 



It has always been a source of infinite amazement to 

 us that a single man of eminence should come forward to 

 advocate the gigantic apparatus for cram implied in a 

 Central Examining Board. 



May the day be far distant when the rising generation 

 shall all be required to feed upon such rations ! One is 

 tempted to think that the advocate of this system must 

 surely have suffered a transmutation similar to that which 

 overtook Bottom, who, in consequence, entertained quite 

 original notions on the subject of food. "I could 

 mimch," said that worthy, " your good dry oats. Me- 

 thinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay; good 

 hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow." 



ORGANISMS IN THE BLOOD, AND THE GERM 

 THEOR Y 



The Microscopic Organisms found in the Blood of Man 

 and Animals, and their Relations to Disease. By 

 Timothy Richards Lewis, M.B., Army Medical De- 

 partment, Special Assistant to the Sanitary Com- 

 missioner with the Government of India. (Calcutta, 



1879.) 



WE have here in a small illustrated work an able 

 critical rtsume of some of the most important 

 facts previously known on the subject together with 



others not hitherto published, tending not only to in- 

 crease our knowledge, but also to throw light upon the 

 general question of the relations of the microscopic 

 organisms found in the blood to disease. 



Nearly two- thirds of the work refers to the existence in 

 the blood of vegetal organisms of the type of Bacteria, 

 Bacillus, and their allies, while the remaining third 

 relates to the existence in this situation of animal orga- 

 nisms. We have in thig latter part a brief but interesting 

 history of what is known concerning the existence of 

 Nematoid hematozoa in the lower animals, and also of 

 what has been learned concerning the embryos of the 

 Filaria sanguinis-hominis, first discovered by the author 

 in 1872, in the blood of persons suffering from Chyluria. 



It seems evident from the account here given that we 

 have still almost everything to learn as to the source and 

 parental forms of these embryo Nematoids found in the 

 blood of man. The hypothesis of Manson concerning 

 the part played by mosquitos as intermediate hosts 

 (within which some of the embryos swallowed may under- 

 go development, and from the.bodies of which parent- 

 forms, capable of infecting man, may find their way into 

 drinking water) seems, from the careful observations 

 made by Lewis, to be rendered more than doubtful. The 

 relations of these organisms to the morbid conditions with 

 which they are associated are, indeed, full of the mosi 

 puzzling difficulties. It is somewhat doubtful whether the 

 mature form of this helminth has yet been discovered^ 

 notwithstanding the observations of Dr. Bancroft in Aus- 

 tralia, and of Dr. Lewis himself (as referred to on pp. 85- 

 89). The fact of the persistence of the envelope of the 

 ovum as a diaphanous sheath, surrounding each of the 

 young embryos found in the blood of man, would seem tc 

 the writer strongly to suggest the probability that the em- 

 bryos in question have been liberated at once into some 

 portion of the vascular system, rather than that they have 

 entered it from without by penetrating its walls. If such 

 a process of struggling through tissues were to take place, 

 their thin diaphanous envelopes would stand a good 

 chance of being torn and left behind. 



Nematoid helminths have long been known to occur ir 

 the blood of many birds, and Dr. Lewis says : " I hav( 

 examined a considerable number of the ordinary Indiar 

 crow {Corvus splendens), and have found that the blooc 

 of nearly half of those which have come under my notice 

 have contained embryo haematozoa of this character 

 Sometimes they are in such numbers as to make it f 

 matter of surprise how it is possible that any animal can 

 survive with so many thousands of such active organism; 

 distributed throughout every tissue of its body. The 

 birds did not appear to be affected in the slightest degree 

 by their presence. In their movements they are verj 

 similar to the nematoid embryos found in man ; they are, 

 however, considerably smaller, and manifest no trace ol 

 an enveloping sheath." 



Again, observations made many years ago by MM. 

 Gruby and Delafond went to show that 4 to 5 per cent, of 

 the dogs in France harboured microscopic nematodes in 

 their blood ; Lewis ascertained in 1874 that more than a 

 third of the pariah dogs of India are similarly affected, 

 whilst Dr. P. Manson has shown that this kind of para- 

 sitism affects at least an equal proportion of dogs in 

 China. The embryo nematodes belonging to dogs ofthese 



